When I was young, I lived in an apartment with a haunted closet. It was a room beside the living room and behind the kitchen. Despite having two exterior walls and being almost as big as the living room and bigger than the kitchen it had no windows. There was no electricity, no lights, no outlets. It had nothing, except an old chest of drawers and a circus poster.
Sharing an apartment with otherworldly manifestation or two, made me more sensitive to the presence of ghosts. I never saw him/them, and only occasionally heard him/them. Sometimes they would smoke my cigarettes, and my pot, they would drink my wine and beer and help themselves to my snacks.
Occasionally, as I slept the ghost(s) would tune the dial on my radio to KCAM, “America’s Country Station,” Waylon and Willie and I shared a lot of breakfast cereal. It was more prank than malevolence. Without ever meeting, over time, the ghost(s) and I became acquaintances, if not friends. Eventually, I left, and the ghost(s) stayed, waiting for a new roommate.
After a few years drifting between places and employment, I landed at a screen-printing plant. I enjoyed the job and hung around, in the way of those places eventually they made me a supervisor.
Rumors swirled about the building’s past, co-workers told me it used to be a roller-skating rink where one person shot another person to death, right on the skating rink floor. Since then, there had been several additions to the building, tacked on to the outside in odd, inconsistent ways. Over time, the demands of a fluctuating business made the owners decide to partition and divide several internal rooms. It left the building with an odd layout, doors in unexpected places, leading to rooms of inconsistent shapes and divergent sizes. Several people claimed to have seen a ghost, wandering through the irregularly shaped chambers, around the mazes of machinery, equipment and storage shelfs.
I never saw the ghost, but there was something, a chill, or an odd noise. It was slight and occasional but it was there, a reminder that we’re never alone.
One December 7th, they called a meeting and announced they were closing the division. It was a somber group that left the room. Despite the projected closing date of mid-February, it left people with the specter of being unemployed and needing to change Christmas plans. The anguish was almost visible, the anger was epidemic, and the pain was obvious. Being a department manager I was there until the end. I watched as people clocked the final punch on their card, their ultimate farewell; bitter, angry disappointment walked arm in arm with abject depression.
Unemployed and armed with few actual skills, and even less potential, I took a job at a hydraulics fitting warehouse. The owner was a devout Christian, a kind man, enthusiastic about scripture and hydraulic fittings. It was a good job, it paid well, and my coworkers were decent people. But the prayer sessions at the end of our daily meetings, and the constant exposure to ideology and dogma took a toll on me. Moreover, the crushing weight of fixtures designed to withstand the high pressures of enclosed hydraulic systems was overwhelming. It was slowly zapping my individuality, behavior modification through salvation and suffering.
A woman’s clothing warehouse decided to open an embroidery division. They got my name from an acquaintance and called me. They were looking for a department supervisor. I jumped at the chance. As a bonus, they had moved into the building that housed the screen-printing plant where I used to work.
As the supervisor I prepared the department for the day’s production and was the first to arrive. Almost daily I could see the ghosts of the screen-printing press operators, gathering in the hallways and breakroom, waiting for the bell to start working. I could hear the rumors swirling around the table that held the coffee pot, both of which were gone, the complaining about the day’s quota, and how they felt management had impossible expectations. Vague shapes, indistinct noises, maybe it wasn’t ghosts of people, maybe it was ghosts of events, an overlay, like an onion skin from previous days.
Over the course of my employment, the warehouse expanded and contracted. At its peak, the glory days of brick-and-mortar retail, the orders piled on the desks. It forced them to change the building, adding walls and small rooms, but the shadows never changed.
I learned that a person didn’t need to die in a place to leave a spirit, it only required existence. If you have some trauma, the pain of your life echoes across the years.
After retiring I became restless. My world was shrinking, and I worried I was giving up, I wasn’t ready to be somebody else’s ghost. I found a job in a small retail store in an L-shaped strip mall, tucked behind a Roosters, a McDonalds and an Olive Garden. It was one of the larger suites in the strip mall, an anchor store location. There is a breakroom. It is big, tucked in behind the manager’s office and the storage area. It is painfully quiet. Coming from the raucous of retail the silence is deafening. Someone, sometime, decided to paint the walls an eggshell white, giving the room the appearance of being larger than it was and brighter than it needed to be.
Over the years the walls became streaked with scuffs and the stains of a company’s breakroom. It provides a little character, though somehow it makes the room appear to be irregularly shaped, out of square. From the entrance, it gave the room a vanishing point drawing perspective, with the bank of lockers and the coats on hooks at the convergence.
If you were feeling tuned into the possibilities of strange coincidence and alternate reality, it can take hours to walk the 25 or 30 feet front to back. If you could establish a connection to the other worlds, you could feel the people who worked there before. Obviously, this had been the break room for the previous store. It could serve as a place to hold company meetings, but the intent and purpose was obvious.
It has been at least two different stores. The first one closed, quickly and ignominiously, several years ago. As a part of a large chain, there was a feeling upper management, miles away, unseen and unknown had betrayed them. It was a feeling of impotence and dread, abandonment by people they trusted with their future. I feel the ghosts. I didn’t know any of these shadows, but I know what they are saying, their feelings of resentment and exploitation, the belief they were unappreciated, their concerns were unheard. It’s a feeling that ran through every workplace I’ve been part of. I didn’t always agree, but I understood
Now, the store where I worked has closed, with the same disbelief, and disgust. I took the job more as a hobby, something to pass the days. I came to work, did my job and went home. It lessened the blow of losing my job, but I remember enough of the old days to know the anguish, to understand the disappointment. I could see it in the faces, hear it in the voices. It echoed in the narrow confines of the breakroom. Even when I was alone in the room specters, old and new, filled the space.
Committees never understand the pain their decisions produce, the lives left in limbo. Corporate decisions ripple and flow from the top all the way to the bottom. On the bottom, where the people have the least that’s where loss is the greatest. Those are the ghosts that gather seniority, the ones that last.
I felt at home with them. I am grateful for the distraction; without them I might have felt condemned, left behind, in the stultifying silence of everyday life.
If you listen you can hear them, walking through the supermarket, standing in line at the bank, at work, everywhere. You can feel the suffering, the loss. It comes to those willing to listen to the ghosts, living and dead. Nobody wants to exist in yesterday’s anger and disappointments, but it’s always nice to know you’re not alone.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
